Re: Possible change to startup.el

From:

Richard Stallman

Subject:

Re: Possible change to startup.el

Date:

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 23:11:17 -0500

unfortunately, i prematurely committed
changes to the actual TUTORIAL files due to concerns that translators
might not see the proposed changes.
We must not wait for the individual translators to look at these
files. That is difficult to manage, and unreliable.
i think it's best that i stick w/
the code and let Marcelo and others handle updates to those files. :-(
I am not going to do it that way. All the TUTORIAL files *must* be
changed at the same time the code is changed. That is my decision.
I would much rather have you change all the files, and get 90% of them
right, than have you not change any files, and 90% will be wrong.
So the point is to change these files the right way. Your new patch
looks for the data in the right way, so I think you understand what
change is right. I just changed etc/TUTORIAL to follow the new
convention; that file now shows what the convention is.
I saw three kinds of cases in looking at these files.
* Files that already started with a translation of "Emacs tutorial"
followed by a period. They were already correct; the only change
needed now is to delete the line you added.
* Files that had some longer sentence there. The longer sentence
needs to be shortened (and the spurious line should be removed).
* Just a few files did not start with such a sentence. Those files
need to be brought into conformity with the rest.
Please do this now.
As for the patch in the code, I think it has some problems. The item
for the FAQ seems to be deleted; I don't think that's right. It puts
in two different items for the TUTORIALs, but the second one is so
complex that I don't understand what job it does.
Please show us the intended output from the second item, the new one.
Please add more comments to both items so that it will be completely
clear what this code is doing.
That needs to be done in order for this patch to be installed.